Case study 5

English Football League (EFL)

About EFL

When the English Football League (EFL) announced they were on the hunt for a long-term digital design and development partner, 175 of the world’s best agencies responded. AmazeRealise were proud to be appointed, and entered into a 7 year partnership up to the 2022/23 season. And that was just the beginning.

Summary of the project

The team were tasked with ensuring that the fan experience was second to none. With a primary focus on the match centre and its third party integrations, I worked closely with real users, the EFL management team, a project team and stakeholders to deliver a platform that provides statistics and up to date information on every match within the EFL

My role

Senior user experience designer

Project timescale

7 months

Old version of the website

The problem statement

The fan experience

●The old legacy EFL club websites needed a facelift, which was having an impact on users perception of EFL and their clubs
●The fans needed to be kept up to date during live events, which due to CMS contraints was proving difficult for fans

The club authoring experience

●Clubs were needing to rely on too many different hardware/software applications to complete the coverage of a matchday over time
●This was shifting the focus of the authors/broadcasters away from the game when it counts, impacting the turnaround times
● Authors were having to find some inventive workarounds just to get their jobs done. This was a cause of frustration and duplication of effort

The CMS platform experience

●Following matchday, the authors needed to create a series of online reports from the coverage of the game. More often than not, a compilation of documents needed to be dissected and uploaded to the CMS
●This way of working was clunky and unreliable
●The CMS experience was inconsistent

EFL fan research

Pulse of the match

The Design

I was tasked with delivering the information architecture of the match centre and worked closely with the design and development teams on the user journeys.

The design style guides and front end UI components for the development team to build from, were well crafted with functional specifications and use cases for each.

The fan experience:

Following a series of user interviews and watching numerous football matches, I was tasked with strategically focusing on the match centre fan experience. We took the "pulse of the match" into consideration. Weighing heavily on the idea that pre-match, during the match and post-match, the users would be expecting exciting content.

A lot of work went into understanding what information to display for the users at each stage of the match.

I worked closely with our design and development teams to ensure a consistent user experience was available during each stage of the match. This had to also be true for every club, whilst also affording them some visual design flexibility to keep their identities unique and on-brand

Club authoring experience

Live reporting directly in the CMS

Fan experience

The solution

For about 4 months, this fantastic product consumed us. Watching the delivery of the editorial experience come together with the work I had put into the match centre, was an incredibly proud moment for all of us.

The fan experience

Fans arriving on the match a few days before the match was due to take place, were able to:

1Find all the preview information needed including the club form guides, recent results, club standings and some detail about the teams performance
2They could also purchase tickets for the event directly

On the day of the match users are presented with more detail including:

1a match centre takeover with subscription services and all the information they will need on the day
2When the match starts they are presented with realtime information and statistics of the game as well as the all important scoreboard

Fans arriving on the match a few days before the match was due to take place, were able to:

1Find all the preview information needed including the club form guides, recent results, club standings and some detail about the teams performance
2They could also purchase tickets for the event directly

Lastly, when a match is complete, they can see:

1The final lineup
2The match report and a breakdown of the match in a live text format
3They can view latest scores and any editorial content such as videos or articles to continue on their journey

Live Reporting experience

CMS for match reporting

Responsive and stylistic

The Outcome

Outputs so far have included:

58 Clubs, 1 platform. The result was a framework that demonstrates a fluid user design experience, driving continuous content discovery.

The match day experience was developed in harmony with ‘the pulse of the club’, providing fans with immediate and exclusive content across any device. The integration of stats, club-curated content and social media updates allows the fan to truly feel part of the game experience.

A series of fan usability tests were also conducted across desktop and mobile to ensure that the sites were useful, usable and compelling to fans across a variety of clubs.

Following the training, each club built their own unique website with the support of the AmazeRealise team. Since launch there has been more than £2.5m in new revenue for EFL

Editorial content